James Joyce's Ulysses, Telemachus, No. 19

[Cf. 1922; 3:24, Gabler; 3:26]

So Mulligan is doing his staged transubstantiation joke, waiting for the sound of his whistling to bounce off the nearby Wicklow hills.  The word "chrysostomos" just sits in the middle of a small paragraph describing Mulligan's face and the scene.  Note how Rob has given it a different style to set it apart from the other dialogue, internal or external. We spent some time talking about this.

People reading Ulysses for the first time are so eager to get to the difficult stuff, the allusions, or just the smutty bits, that this odd and completely symptomatic moment on the first page gets passed over.  When I teach Ulysses, I like to dwell on this word for an uncomfortably long time, because the more you look at it, the weirder it gets.

Key question: who says it?  It's not dialogue, because it doesn't have one of the dashes that Joyce preferred to set off actual spoken words (as opposed to pedestrian quotation marks).  It seems to be the narrator, but it's pretty elliptical for a narrator--a normal narrator would say something like: "his teeth had gold caps, and they shone in the sun and made him golden-mouthed like St. John Chrysostomos."  So it's abrupt, and if you ask me, it's a chain of logic that sounds much more like Stephen than any impartial narrator.  This the next of many examples of the Uncle Charles Principle . 

But who is Chrysostomos anyway?  I've never found a really satisfactory connection to this allusion.  On some level, it's just that Mulligan as noticeable gold in his teeth. He's also a clever talker. So he's golden-mouthed.  Gifford is a good souce for going deeper into this kind of thing. He suggests a couple of possible suspects, one being the Greek rhetorician Dion Chrysostomos, another being the early church father St. John Chrysostomos .

These are perfectly legit and all, but I don't really feel they add much to what we know about Mulligan. If anything.  Gifford's third candidate, Pope Gregory I, is a more likely match. Called by the Irish "Gregory Goldenmouthed," he was a Roman pope who took on the project of converting the Britons to Roman Christianity ( as opposed to the strange Irish brand being practiced next door).  If you have better candiates, please let me know!